Meet the Voices

Hemming Allen Grant was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, close enough to the Mississippi to hear the towboats at night. His father worked the river; his mother taught school and kept a shelf of Twain she called “the family Bible, unabridged.” He played American Legion ball until his arm gave out, then spent thirty years teaching high school English to kids who swore they hated books until he proved otherwise. He writes about small towns, long summers, and people who carry their whole lives in a single good season. He still lives above the river, in a house with a porch built for listening. His wife says he’s never once finished a story without walking down to the water first.

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Gray I. Rony grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma, next door to Fort Sill, where the artillery practiced every morning and no dish in his mother’s cupboard ever sat still. He played football for Lawton High, drove a brown 1972 Chevy Vega named Hodog that held a firm position on hills, and grew up idolizing an uncle who retired from the Army a command sergeant major and could end any argument by clearing his throat. Gray followed him into uniform and learned that every institution runs on paperwork nobody has read. He came home determined to read all of it, and he has been filing objections ever since. He writes satire for people who suspect the rules were made up, and memoir for people who know the rules got broken anyway. He has been called George Carlin’s ghost arguing with Mark Twain’s ghost, mostly by himself. He lives in the South Carolina Lowcountry with a wife from South Africa he is increasingly sure is a mythological being, and a 128-ounce water bottle he calls the Hydration Monolith.

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Wyatt Wayne Brennan grew up outside Ada, Oklahoma, where the wind never quit and neither did his father, a roughneck who came home smelling of crude and said maybe forty words a week. Wyatt enlisted at eighteen and stayed twenty-two years. He served in places he still won’t name at the dinner table, most of it spent listening to people tell him things they shouldn’t have. He came home with a bad knee, a good ear, and the conviction that the most dangerous man in any room is the quiet one paying attention. He writes about men and women who’ve been tested and found out what they’re made of, sometimes too late to matter. He lives on a few acres back in Pontotoc County, where he fixes fence that doesn’t need fixing and writes before sunrise.

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Art Blue learned to read in the Enoch Pratt Free Library because it was warm, it was free, and nobody bothered a kid with a book. He grew up in a Pigtown rowhouse in Baltimore, the son of a night-shift nurse who played blues records low while he slept; the neighborhood started calling him “Blue” before he was ten, and it stuck. He spent his twenties cooking on the line and pouring drinks in Fells Point, where he discovered that people will confess anything to a bartender at two in the morning. He writes love stories that cost something: about desire, the wreckage it leaves, and the grace that sometimes follows. He still lives in Baltimore and still won’t tell you which bar.

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By the time Runnie Ink graduated high school she had attended eleven of them, on Air Force bases from Misawa to Osan to Ramstein, always the new girl and always watching. Her father flew; her mother kept the household packed and ready on seventy-two hours’ notice. The nickname came from childhood, from cheap fountain pens that bled through every page of the notebooks she filled. She learned early that the most interesting part of any person is the part they think you can’t see. She writes short, hot, and honest about wanting things. She lives in a harbor city she prefers not to name, and keeps it that way.

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